Thursday, July 13, 2017

Russia Needs the US as an Enemy and as a Supporter, Shevtsova Says

Paul
Goble

Staunton, July 13 – During Mikhail
Gorbachev’s first visit to Washington, Gyorgy Arbatov, the Soviet Union’s
leading Americanist who was accompanying him, said that the Soviet leader was
going to do something far more terrible to the United States than any of his
predecessors: Namely, Gorbachev was going to take away Washington’s preferred
enemy.

Although it is unlikely that Arbatov
knew then just how far Gorbachev was prepared to go, even contributing to the
demise of the USSR, his insight was fundamental. Without an enemy, Arbatov
suggested, the US would be unable to navigate in a brave new world and would be
forced either to find new enemies or to build up Moscow so that it could resume
that role.

Now, thirty years later, Liliya
Shevtsova, a Brookings Institution Russian expert based in Moscow, makes a similar
argument but this time about Russia’s needs.“Imagine,” she says, that the US suddenly disappeared?” What would Putin
do, given that he believes the world rests on “hostility and cooperation with
America” (echo.msk.ru/blog/shevtsova/2017622-echo/).

However loath the
Kremlin is to admit it, she continues, “America has become our systemic ‘binding,”
given the exhaustion of any other “unifying ideas.” No other country can play
the role of a foreign “threat” sufficient to justify the Kremlin’s position and
mobilize the Russian people behind it. It would be an insult to Russia to put
any other country in that role.

Moreover, Shevtsova says, “America
is splendid enemy.” Under Barack Obama, for example, Washington “did everything
possible not to make Putin angry” despite his behavior. But there is another reason
Moscow looks to the US: Americans played a key role in buiding up the Soviet
economy and military-industrial complex.”

“Without the assistance of America,”
she argues, “the Soviet Union hardly would have been transformed into a global
power.”And she cites the evidence of US
assistance government and non-government provided in Anthony Sutton’s 1973
volume, National Suicide (New
Rochelle, 1973).

As Shevtsova notes, Stalin
recognized this, telling the US ambassador that “two-thirds of all major
industrial enterprises in the USSR were built with the help of the US or with
American technical support.” All major US companies worked in the USSR, and “the
Americans sold [it] licenses for the latest technology,” arms in the first
instance but other things as well.

There were two reasons for this,
Sutton argued in his book. On the one hand, “Americans believed that through
trade and cooperation they would tame the rising giant.”But on the other, many in the US believed in
the Soviet project of “building communism” and promoted the idea that the US
should be involved in this.

But Shevtsova suggests that “the
most striking story was the participation of America in saving Soviet Russia
from famine in 1921-1923,” assistance organized and led by future US president
Herbert Hoover that Lenin first opposed but then accepted and led to the saving
of some ten million lives.

Thus, she continues, “America
demonstrated not only capitalist pragmatism but generosity and compassion.”

During World War II, “America again
came to the aid of the USSR,” and between 1941 and 1945, Washington extended
military and humanitarian assistance that was worth in today’s prices, 146
billion US dollars. And that was only the government: ordinary Americans
created a special committee to assist “Russia at war” and sent millions more.

When the USSR collapsed, the US
again provided assistance. “Between 1992 and 2007, the total amount of
assistance to the Russian Federation from the US government amounted to 16
billion US dollars,” Shevtsova says.And
the structure of that assistance showed that “America was trying to support
stability in Russia and to help resolve the problems of security.”

Russia, like the Soviet Union before
it, responded by pointing to the US as its number on enemy and threat.“And today, “Russia needs American technology
and investment, and today it needs America as the basis of its great power
status.” That has some implications many in Moscow (and in Washington) prefer
not to think about.

“The key to the survival of Russian
autocracy is in the pockets of Americans.

The
anti-Americanism of the Russian elite and its obsession with America are only a
confirmation of what it knows about this, the Brookings analyst says.

“It remains only to pose the question:
does American know that it is our systemic ‘binding’? Or does it pretend not to
know? Or does it know and not understand what to do with this role?” And that
leads to a final question: What if the US does know and acts on it?How will Russia’s “statist regime on steroids”
survive at a time of need?